Fish, Family, Freedom

Alaska’s Senate Race Could Be Decided by Salmon

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Alaska’s Senate race, a close contest between the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, and the former congresswoman Mary Peltola, is that salmon are pretty amazing fish. There’s the swimming upstream, the spawning, and the dying. Bears love salmon. Orcas love salmon. People love salmon. Without salmon, the first Alaskans, crossing the Bering land bridge some fifteen thousand years ago, could not have survived. On a recent trip to Alaska, I was, at various points, fed salmon for dinner, offered salmon as a gift, and given salmon for barter. Directly or indirectly, salmon feeds almost everything in the state, including its politics. Alaska’s bid for statehood, in the late nineteen-fifties, was in part a matter of keeping the hands of Seattle businessmen off local salmon stocks. Business deals are hammered out at fishing retreats. In 2010, a seaplane carrying Ted Stevens, likely the most powerful politician ever to come out of Alaska, crashed en route to a salmon lodge near Bristol Bay. He died wearing his waders.

People in the Lower Forty-eight care a lot about Alaska’s Senate race. This cycle, it has been twice as expensive, per capita, as Michigan’s, and eight times Texas’s. The attention is unusual. In federal elections, Alaska reliably votes Republican; every time Donald Trump has been on the ballot, Alaska has voted for him by ten points or more. But, amid historically low approval ratings for the President, the Democrats are hoping to flip the seat, an essential part of any attempt to wrest back control of both houses of Congress. Trump, meanwhile, is clearly nervous about holding the seat. He recently headlined a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla, a small city north of Anchorage. “This is worth the eight hours on a plane,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, I got eight hours going back, too.”

In January, Chuck Schumer recruited Peltola to run, calling her the “last piece to the puzzle” of his midterms plan. Peltola, the state’s former at-large House member, launched her campaign with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” To most outsiders, this read as folksy branding for a race that would inevitably be dominated by Donald Trump. But Peltola really wants to talk about fish. Recently, I saw her speak at the elementary school in Utqiagvik, an Arctic town at the state’s northern tip. It was a very unusual stump speech. She apologized for the “super negative, toxic ads” flooding the state, including her own. She mentioned her opponent just once: a flattering anecdote about his advocacy for an oil project she supports. She didn’t mention Trump at all. And even though, compared with the rest of the state, salmon is not so big in Utqiagvik, Peltola still mostly talked about fish.

This piscine primacy is relatively new in Alaska’s politics. In past election cycles, fish have always been one issue among many. But Alaska’s fish are in crisis. In recent years, runs of Chinook, or king salmon, the biggest and most revered species on the Yukon River, have been down as much as eighty per cent from average levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Chum salmon, a more ordinary variety, have had an O.K. year, but they’ve been down as much as ninety per cent. Some species and some areas are worse off than others, but the general trend is bad, including for the state’s other two iconic seafood catches, halibut and crab. As I travelled around the state, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone I talked to was upset about the fish situation. One political consultant explained, “A lot of people come into the state, and they’re, like, ‘Why the hell is Mary Peltola “fish, family, freedom”?’ I’m a white guy who lives in Anchorage, and my freezer is currently full of rockfish, halibut, and salmon that I’ve caught because that’s just what we all do.”

The crisis is worst up rivers such as the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. For many thousands of years, entire Athabascan and Yup’ik villages have subsisted on salmon. ... But stocks have got so low that, in 2024, the Alaska government, in conjunction with Canada, shut down fishing for king salmon on the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years—one complete king-salmon life cycle. The fish camps stand empty. [...]

Research scientists with the N.P.F.M.C. and N.O.A.A. attribute the die-off, primarily, to climate change. But activists in Alaska have mostly focussed their ire on a type of fishing known as trawling. In the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, the main target of commercial fishing boats is pollock, a medium-sized, mild fish that swims in fantastically vast schools. Trawlers catch pollock by dragging enormous nets; some open wide enough to swallow a thousand M.T.A. buses. Any net you put in the water will incidentally catch other, non-targeted fish. This is known as bycatch. Every year, the Alaskan pollock industry brings up around twenty thousand king salmon and around a quarter million pounds of halibut as bycatch. Recently, anger at this collateral damage, heightened by the fish shortage, has evolved into a political movement.

On Facebook, the group Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch, launched in early 2020, has close to sixty thousand members, almost a tenth the population of Alaska itself. It calls for a ban on trawling. “You know how ‘Tiger King’ came out during lockdown and got big? The Facebook group was the same thing,” David Bayes, who moderates it, told me. Peltola, who is Yup’ik and grew up along the Kuskokwim, joined the group in its early days. [...]

I’d assumed that pollock people—businesspeople—would lean Republican, and the salmon people—the conservation-oriented—would lean Democratic, but that’s not really the case. “There’s nothing partisan about it,” Peltola told me recently. “When you ask folks who are MAGA why they’re splitting the ticket and voting for me, it’s largely because of trawling.” (The campaign later pointed out that a lot of those voters are also animated by high fuel prices.) Politics in Alaska are idiosyncratic. They rarely map onto a national partisan model. Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, but independent voters outnumber both. “Partisan politics doesn’t work that well for a candidate,” Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to serve as governor, told me. A government staffer in a remote region put it to me, “Locally, no one gives a shit about the parties.”

One oddity of Alaska politics is that, though only twelve per cent of voters identify as Democrats, both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives are currently controlled by coalitions made up mostly of Democrats and independents, with some Republicans. Coalition governments are not uncommon in the state, where politicians are fond of saying that pragmatism trumps partisanship. Sometimes it’s more about vibes. “Somebody is a magnificent pain in the ass, and we don’t want them in our caucus so we build a caucus to exclude them,” Joelle Hall, a longtime union leader, told me. Imagine a congressional coalition formed by kicking out the lawmakers, on either side, who are annoying—the Ted Cruzes and the John Fettermans. Peltola tried to explain this unique approach by telling me that the current coalition “took the hardest people to work with and just put them to the side, and then everybody else joined as a majority to move forward and solve problems. And that is a model I am hoping we can export to every state in the nation.” [...]

“Alaskans consider themselves more Alaskan than Republican, and more Alaskan, quite honestly, than they are American,” Scott Kendall, an attorney and longtime G.O.P. political consultant in the state, told me. “We like each other. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful thing. And I’ve been back to D.C. and elsewhere enough to know how good we’ve got it.” I told him that many of my political assumptions from the Lower Forty-eight didn’t quite translate to the state. “Most of my Democratic friends have guns,” Kendall said. “A lot of my conservative Republican friends grow weed.” Many political ads in the current race—the ones Peltola had apologized for—have resorted to partisan rage bait (trans fearmongering, Epstein) or personal attacks. These tend to be produced by out-of-state super PACs not connected to either campaign. “I actually don’t think they’re very effective,” Kendall said. “We all know each other. People see Mary or Dan in the airport all the time.”

The fact that subsistence fishing has become important to the campaign is good for Peltola, who once wrote of herself, “I am made of fish,” and less good for Sullivan, who is originally from Ohio and not a notable angler. On a walk in Anchorage, I saw a sidewalk chalked with the words “DAN EATS FARMED FISH WITH KETCHUP.” But he, too, has been forced to weigh in on the issue. In June, back in D.C., he introduced a trawling bill that offered wonkish, incremental changes to fishing practices in Alaska. The bill never made it off the Senate floor, but it did give him something to run on. In Anchorage, Arthur Hackney, who runs a Sullivan-aligned PAC called We Stand with Dan, showed me an ad he’d recently cut. On the screen, the text read “This Election is About Fish, Family, Freedom,” Peltola’s exact campaign motto. Then it said, “On all of these, Senator Dan Sullivan actually delivers results.” Hackney explained, “People don’t understand how easy it is to just take the other person’s thing and you claim it for your own.” A strategist working with the Democrats told me it was surreal to see Sullivan trying to co-opt fishing. “He’s a marine, good-looking guy. There’s a lot of good things you could say about him. He’s not a commercial fisherman.”

As I spoke with Peltola voters across Alaska, I noticed a split between those who think she is talking too much about fishing, when a stronger message would be the war in Iran or gas prices, and those who worry that the outside strategists urging the Peltola campaign to focus on national topics will drown out her winning message. Alaska’s core constituency is composed of Natives, fishermen, rural legislators, and unions, with some chamber-of-commerce types mixed in. Peltola is a gun-owning, fish-catching Alaska-bush native, who has worked for mines and supports oil drilling, and is allied with the state’s largest labor unions. “You’ve got a once-in-a-generation candidate who is all the pieces of that coalition as one person,” the strategist told me. “You worry that the federal PACs will come in and fuck all that up. What’s actually somewhat surprising to me is that we’re here in October, and the dominant issue of the race is still trawl bycatch and local fisheries, which says they didn’t fuck it up that bad.” [...]

Trawling is a wedge issue in Kodiak. Many people rely on trawling, directly or indirectly, for work, but small seiners, long-liners, and crab fishermen have major issues with it. (“There’s five different fisheries groups, and they all basically think the others are stealing fish from them,” Hackney, the G.O.P. political consultant, told me.) ... We were at the brewery in town with the mayor, Terry Haines, who is also a retired fisherman, and the host of the Alaska Fisheries Report on KMXT, the local radio station. (He also d.j.s a half-hour spot of soul music every week.) “Bycatch is not the driver of our stock crashes,” he said. “It is simply the only lever that we have to pull. So that makes it a valid reason to look at pulling that lever. But you have to realize that you can pull that lever all the way down to the floor, and you’re still not going to change the environment that’s causing the fishery collapses.”

Peltola insists on what is called “rural preference”: in times of shortage, subsistence fishing must come first. Carrie Stevens, the representative for the Council of Athabascan Tribes, told me, “If people on the rivers have a moratorium to stand down, why is it so obscene to ask others to bear any brunt of conservation?” The tribes contend that the government’s scientists are underestimating the effect of trawling. One argument is that it’s not just the bycatch but the catch itself. Salmon eat juvenile pollock—or would, if they didn’t become fish sticks. Jim Balsiger, who retired as NOAA’s top fisheries official in Alaska in 2021, said recently, “Removing three to four billion pounds of fish from the Bering Sea every year for four decades is not a benign activity.” [...]

Fishing jobs like these are essential to Alaskan identity and have been declining across the state. Gunnar Knapp, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and a prominent fishery economist, told me that the trawling issue has become about more than just fishing regulations. “A lot of this is symbolic. There is a vision that the world economy has been moving inexorably toward this dystopia controlled by large corporations, capitalism, and global enterprises, where the individual is marginalized and means nothing,” Knapp said. “If you’ve ever seen a trawl net when it comes in, it seems so appalling. You think, ‘You won’t have any fish left in the ocean!’ Well, it actually is sustainable, for pollock. But it’s not noble like a guy holding up one subsistence salmon.” The choice for Alaskans is difficult: crack down significantly on trawl, and you’ll limit global food supply and inflict significant damage to the state economy. In return, you’ll possibly get small gains upriver. “It’s less economic than moral or ethical,” Knapp said. “What costs are worth it for even a marginal improvement to the salmon runs? I think some people would say anything is worth it.” As a friend in Anchorage put it, “Trawling is our version of data centers.”

The problem in Alaska isn’t finding persuadable voters. It’s reaching them. Campaign staffers pack sleeping bags and pads, in case they get socked in at a remote village. This year, in the election precinct of Nuiqsut, an Iñupiat Eskimo area, only ten people voted in the primary election. It’s about three times the size of New Jersey. On St. George Island, way out in the Bering Sea, Peltola won the primary by a ratio of two to one—two votes total, to one. [...]

Everywhere I visited around the state, I was surprised by how trawling manifested politically. Everich, the trawling captain, said that he used to be “a very strong Republican,” but fish politics had scrambled everything, and he was presently undecided. Although Sullivan is widely viewed by trawlers as less antagonistic, the industry has also been squeezed by rising costs from tariffs, insurance, and fuel. I encountered some MAGA flags along the docks, but this year, Everich said, “Trump supporters have changed their perspectives. To pay seven dollars a gallon for diesel because of a foreign war and then be, like, ‘Go Trump’? That would be difficult.” Kubiak, the retired English teacher and fisherman, was voting for Peltola, but he actually didn’t like her trawling ban. “Too easy,” he said. “She’s painting with a broad brush, and it’s really dangerous to do that.”

I asked Peltola if she saw any parallels between the fish battles and fights elsewhere: against climate change, A.I. monopolization, or against the bankers after the Great Recession. (Kubiak told me that he was worried the pollock industry had become “too big to fail.”) She said no. Salmon is uniquely important. “I have not figured out a way to teach my kids Yup’ik values unless we’re hunting and fishing,” she said. As a political issue, its utility is that everyone likes salmon. 

by Zach Helfand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Clara Mokri / NYT / Redux
[ed. As a Habitat Biologist with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game for 30 years I love the state, its unique culture and its people (not to mention its fish) and feel compelled to comment. ADF&G used to be a world-class management and research agency until it got politicized and partially dismantled in 2002 by our dimwitted new governor, Frank Murkowski (junior Senator in Washington, promptly appointed his daughter Lisa to his former job). It and the state have never been the same. Contrary to Mary's slogan, Frank's might best be described as: unrestricted development (oil, logging, mining, etc), no fiscal restraint, no environmental barriers. There has to be better management of these resoures or scarcity will only get worse (another one: discredited predator control programs to promote increased caribou production).]

Alaskan Gasbags

A $54 Billion Exercise in Revisionist History

So here we have Republican former legislator Charisse Millett claiming that President Donald Trump never claimed that a deal had been approved with Korea to pay $54 billion for the Alaska LNG project.

Millett claims that Trump, Sen. Dan Sullivan, Rep. Nick Begich the Third, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Glenfarne did not portray the Korean “investment” as a done deal.

Perhaps Millett was fed bad information by Sullivan.

Perhaps she failed to do any homework.

Perhaps she didn’t pay attention to what Trump said.

Perhaps she thinks she can get away with rewriting the history of the past three weeks to improve the campaign picture for Republicans.

What’s certain is that her analysis is completely wrong.

Larry Persily wrote a good column in the Anchorage Daily News in which he told the truth about the gas line campaign fraud perpetrated on Alaskans right before the election.

The column obviously touched a nerve with Sullivan, who had been hoping to ride to reelection on the basis of winning the gas pipeline deal to end all gas pipeline deals.

Millett’s response in the ADN touched on exactly the same points that Suzanne Downing, whom Sullivan portrays as an exemplar of integrity, used to attack Persily — that his column was motivated by politics alone. That no one promised a gas pipeline, etc.

What the Sullivan apologists can’t confess is that Persily’s column was exactly right — the White House claimed it has a $54 billion deal in hand with Korea, but that nation says the claim is not true.

As they stood behind Trump in the Oval Office at the Sept. 30 campaign stunt, however, Sullivan, Begich and Dunleavy led a gas line victory dance.

I still don’t know if they knew the $54 billion was a charade or if they were desperate to believe a Trump lie because it would help con Alaskans into thinking a miracle had happened.

There was nothing conditional about the Trump announcement at all or how the Alaska politicians received it, contrary to Millett’s meandering missive.

“Thank you Mr. President!” Sullivan said afterward. “Glad we could get this across the finish line for Alaska!”

Fresh from the White House gas line party, Sullivan went on a right-wing talk show in Anchorage to say the money was in hand to build the gas pipeline, attack his challenger Mary Peltola and praise Trump, who had said that the pipeline would be built because of Dan Sullivan.

“I think the president has no interest in switching horses when he just said the guy who’s getting it done for Alaska and us is me right now,” Sullivan told Mike Porcaro, adding that the president of Korea had agreed to pay for the massive project.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “really really drove a hard bargain with the Koreans,” Sullivan claimed. “But this is a really important day. It’s exciting.”

“It’s a big announcement. $54 billion. It’s a president to a president of an important ally,” said Sullivan. As Sullivan went after Peltola for being soft on the gas line, he said she was “saying anything to get elected.”

Dunleavy, who also appeared on Porcaro’s talk show Sept. 30, said, “Whenever you can get $50 billion plus coming your way for the largest gas project in the Arctic’s history and probably the largest project in the Pacific and certainly the largest project on the map in the world right now, that’s a good day Mike.”

Dunleavy said on social media it “was a fantastic day both for Alaska and for America as President Trump announced that the Republic of Korea is investing $54B into the Alaska LNG project, ensuring affordable, reliable gas for Alaskans.”

“Our South Korean allies are partners now, they are providing a lot of funding for this, upwards of $50 billion plus,” Dunleavy said.

Begich the Third also claimed the $54 billion deal was a historic accomplishment that Alaskans could take to the bank. He said the delegation was excited about what the pipeline would mean for the state.

And Sullivan and Begich should be reelected, Begich the Third said.

“When you’re putting up championships, you don’t trade Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. You come back and you win again,” Begich the Third told Porcaro.

The Third did not say whether he sees himself as Jordan or Pippen in that analogy.

by Dermot Cole, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image:AP Photo/Alex Brandon
[ed. Man, they're trying everything. See here and here. See also: In U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project Emerges (NYT):]

*****

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an All-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations. [...]

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that it, in fact, was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

Why Trump’s 2024 Voters Are Turning on Him

[ed. Illuminating throughout: Iran, corruption, affordability, healthcare, Epstein, Israel, data centers, and more. I'll probably trim quite a bit of this later, but for now enjoy the expanded version.]

Since he took office in 2025, Donald Trump’s net approval rating has collapsed, falling by more than 30 points. As we head into the midterms, Democrats now have the opportunity to do something that seemed unthinkable just a year ago: to take back not just the House but the Senate, possibly even winning in places like Texas and Kansas.

So how did Donald Trump go from winning his first popular vote victory ever to, in less than two years, what now looks like it could be an electoral wipeout for Republicans?

Sarah Longwell is a political consultant and the founder and publisher of The Bulwark. Since the 2016 election, she has conducted hundreds of focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum that have become this really extraordinary source of qualitative evidence of how voters have evolved in the Trump era — particularly voters who had leaned toward Trump but maybe now don’t.

Ezra Klein: Sarah Longwell, welcome to the show.

Sarah Longwell: Thanks for having me. I’m superexcited to be here.

Donald Trump takes office again in January 2025. His approval rating is above 50 percent. He has his biggest electoral victory ever.

He’s now at 36 percent.

I think you’ve probably personally done more focus groups with Trump voters of different flavors and variants than anybody else in America.

So what happened?

It’s easy, actually. This is the easiest question in politics right now. Donald Trump made some very specific choices, and they were his choices, and everyone knows they were his choices.

The first one was when he did all of the unilateral tariffs, didn’t consult Congress and just got into trade wars with a whole bunch of people. And the second was starting the war with Iran.

Voters completely identify those two things with Trump. You can’t say Joe Biden did that. You can’t say it was someone else or Congress. There was nothing else.

The deep state went to war on Iran.

Donald Trump made these choices, and voters know it.

The consequences of both have been to raise prices for the American people at a time when they elected Donald Trump to do one thing: lower prices.

And as a secondary matter, they said: No more stupid wars.

So the voters right now recognize that their life is not getting better and that Donald Trump has broken his promises. That is the easiest way to explain what’s happening right now.

Tariffs were a promise from Donald Trump. He ran for office saying again and again and again: Tariffs on everyone, tariffs in all directions.

I can imagine, if you’re him, you look at your tariff policy as promises kept. So when his supporters tell you what they don’t like about them, what do they say?

Well, the thing about voters is that they are often not interested in the policy minutiae of how one gets to a place. They’re just saying: What are we going to do to lower prices?

The thing that has shocked me the most listening to voters — not even shocked, it’s more the thing that I find has changed my relationship with voters — is that the first thing we do is ask people: How do you think things are going in the country?

And every focus group, every single time, doesn’t matter — whether left, right or center — right now, people say: bad. And then they immediately start talking about the prices of something.

They talk about the prices of gas. They talk about the prices of beef. But they talk about something they did: I walked into the store today, and the beef cost X dollars, and that’s $2 more than it did, and it wasn’t even the good stuff.”

Americans don’t necessarily connect policy rhetoric to the outcome. They live through something, see the outcome, and then they decide how they feel about it. 

On that point, about the ground beef, I want to play a clip that your team shared with me from one of the focus groups. This is someone who voted for Trump in 2024.

Archival clip: I grocery shop every week, so I know when prices are going down and up, and I’m like: He’s lying. Nothing has changed — OK, maybe the eggs have gone down, but that’s it.

I’ve never paid $9 for ground beef before — ever — even the good kind. So that is really, really crazy and getting very scary. I really thought that it was going to be about us here at home.

When that woman says to you: “I really thought it was going to be about us here at home” — what did she think?

What did the people who had swung toward Trump in 2024 see in him that they maybe hadn’t seen in 2020?

Well, this is the promise of “America first.”

“America first” has a lot of racist origins. But for the voters, “America first” is an idea that the president is going to prioritize them — Mr. and Mrs. American — and they like that promise. They like the idea of not sending all this money to other places.

I hear versions of this in basically every group that I do, which is: We want to be taken care of. We want money spent on our schools.

It’s interesting watching Abdul El-Sayed, because he’s doing a version of this right now, his own version of “America first.”

Often when he gets asked the question about Israel, he says: I don’t want our money going overseas. I want it spent here in Michigan. I want it spent on our schools, on taking care of our people.

Archival clip of Abdul El-Sayed: I’m opposed to unconditional military aid for any country. That is Israel, yes, but that’s also Egypt, where my family immigrated from. That’s Pakistan, that’s Saudi Arabia, that’s U.A.E. And that’s not because of a focus on what’s happening anywhere except for a focus on what’s happening here. We’ve got communities in my state where the median income is $14,000. And I believe they have a right to their tax dollars.

And that is something that appeals to Americans deeply. They say: Yes, we want to be taken care of.

They feel like, in the big maelstrom of conversations — whether it’s sort of the weird social issues that people get wrapped around the axle about or whether it’s the big geopolitical questions that politicians are always talking about — what they really want to know is: What are you going to do for me? [...]

I think this is a problem that ends up afflicting both sides. It happened to the Biden administration during their term, and now it’s happening to Trump, which is: You get elected, and the voters who crucially put you over the top — not your big base of voters who are always going to vote for you but the people who made the difference in the election — they hire you to do often a job that is maybe not the job that you’re most excited about doing.

Voters want lower prices. They’re maybe not as bought-in on climate change questions as Democrats are.

And there are all these people around you who have your ear — who, in fact, do not have problems buying groceries in the grocery store. They have things they are much more excited about doing. So you have this constant pressure to get off the course of what the swing voters wanted from you.

That seems, to me, to be a lot of the Trump story here. He won because inflation was high, but he didn’t really care about inflation. That’s not what gets him out of bed in the morning.

No, what gets Donald Trump out of bed in the morning is Donald Trump’s interests in enriching himself. This goes back to the earlier question: Why do Americans think that Donald Trump is in it for them?

The way that I heard so many voters characterize it is that the process was so slow and sclerotic, and they felt like nothing was changing, and the way that politicians talked all sounded the same.

But mostly, they thought: This guy is a businessman — and that means that he is going to figure it out. Because this is what Donald Trump pitched all the time: I’m going to cut deals for you. I know how this system works. It’s rigged against you. I’m going to unrig it.

And voters really did think, whether it was because of “The Apprentice” — and I cannot tell you how important “The Apprentice” is and was to the lore that sits inside voters ——

Still, by 2024, it was so important?

He lived, in their living rooms, at the top of a boardroom where he made decisions about business, and that is what voters really internalized about Donald Trump.

So when inflation was high, they thought he was going to come in, and in some way that is magic from him — sort of like the Kool-Aid Man busting through the window — and say: Here, I’m going to lower grocery prices on Day 1.

They think he has some secret sauce that allows him to do that. When, of course, it is just a lie. He couldn’t do it.

There are a lot of ways that the people who interpret politics publicly — my job, for instance — end up having a lot of trouble understanding voters.

One of the ways is that we think of the primary divide in the electorate as left or right. But the primary divide in politics, I always think, is between interested and uninterested. The hard-core left and the hard-core right, MAGA, the liberals, resistance, whatever it is, they’re all interested. They’re all following some media source constantly.

But a lot of voters don’t like politics. And they’re not that interested.

So I’d like to hear you talk about the different ways that people who decide elections but do not follow politics that closely in between elections — that difference in the electorate and how they then understand what is happening.

We talk in political science terms. We’re always slicing and dicing the electorate, and we often talk about “low-information voters.” I always think that is an unfair term to people who are just not sick in the head like us, who are not following everything, who don’t let their nervous systems be hijacked on a daily basis by the vicissitudes of political wrangling.

Low neuroticism voters. [Laughs.]

Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to be like: Actually, I’m going to focus on my family and getting my kids out the door, and then I’ve got to go to a job that’s quite demanding. And both parents in the household are working.

One of the things we ask about in the focus groups all the time is: Where do people get their information?

And it is unsatisfying now, because it used to be that people would be pretty clear. They’d be like: I watch Fox News. Or: I watch CNN. I read this newspaper. I read The New York Times. Or: I read my local newspaper.

The majority of people would often say that they watch their local news. But now what people mostly say is: I don’t know where I saw that.

They’re scrolling. They’ve got their favorite cooking influencer, or they’re scrolling on Instagram or TikTok — an algorithm-driven information environment where they mostly want basketball or sports. But then there’s Stephen A. Smith talking about politics.

So this is why, when people said: The left needs its own Joe Rogan — and they tend to reach for people who are actually political pundits. But that’s not what Joe Rogan is.

Joe Rogan is a comedian. I mean, I don’t watch a ton of his content, but I do think there’s a fair amount of getting stoned and figuring out who would win between a shark or a gorilla if they fought each other. And then they have a guest, and the guest says whatever, and Joe Rogan really doesn’t challenge him because he’s not a subject matter expert in much.

That’s about culture. There are cultural people all over the place where politics is injected.

There used to be this phrase: Politics is downstream from culture. I think, increasingly, the overlap between politics and culture combines into something that is a deeply nonpolitical-science term, which we would call a vibe.

And that vibe is what a lot of the low-information voters are getting. Something that washes over them, that is algorithmically injected into the cultural things that they imbibe.

Say more about that. What changes in politics — or what have you watched change in politics — as it has become more, in your language here, vibe oriented?

I think it’s the big difference between news seekers and news receivers.

We used to live in a world where you spent time with the news, and it was a specific time. You sat down at the breakfast table, and you read a newspaper. You watched the evening news. You made time for the news.

I just think that the news receiver means: I didn’t sit down to find something out. Information just washed over me, and there was no mechanism to verify it. I didn’t really sit and spend time with it and ask: Is this true? Does it even matter to me? It just hit me for a second.

It just flashes over them. So they wake up with an opinion without any idea of how it was formed.

I want to talk about something that seems to have begun breaking through. And I don’t really know why it’s finally breaking through now, but it is: corruption.

I want to play a clip from a Trump voter talking about corruption and how it has changed in his view.

Archival clip: I’m a Republican. I’m just saying he’s front and center now. And he’s just blatant with corruption. But we tolerated corruption in a way, or looked the other way. Even their own politicians look the other way at each other. But because it was more minimal or more obscure … every now and then you heard of a big corruption thing here or there, whatever, a pay-for-play.

But now it’s just like: bang! He just does it blatantly. He just says what he wants to do. He’s investing in crypto. His sons are invested in drones, just before the war started with Iran. It’s ridiculous. It’s so obvious and blatant now.

This Fox News poll from October asked voters how concerned they were about key issues. More expressed concern over corruption in government than any other issue. It came out higher in this Fox News poll than prices and health care, the war in Iran and immigration.

Corruption has just been constant in the Trump administration. I was watching corruption in polls through the whole administration, waiting for it to attain salience.

It was just like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing — and then suddenly, it’s the top issue.

What broke through?

It’s prices again. Everything comes back to people’s relationship to the economy. And this is a bummer, actually, of an observation, but the American people — especially Trump voters and more low-information voters — would probably let Trump get away with corruption. In fact, we know they would — he was doing a lot of corrupt things in his first term.

People didn’t really care. You couldn’t get them to care about how much he was spending on golf or having big meetings at all of his hotels with the rich.

All the insane crypto stuff during the 2024 election, that was the one I always thought was crazy — the Trump family getting involved in crypto scams and meme coins during the election and the post-electoral period.

They don’t care. But again, it comes down to people’s relationship with their own money. If they thought Trump could do something for them — and you can see this especially with people who are superengaged on the crypto stuff — if they think they can make some money off Trump, they don’t care about his corruption.

There are two reasons that corruption is breaking through right now. The first is, people are suffering economically.

And so all of Trump’s focus on his ballroom and the Reflecting Pool frustrates voters that he is not focused on them — he’s focused on himself.

But also, the enriching himself is becoming difficult to ignore because it’s so out in the open. And when people are not doing well, they’re angrier about it.

The second reason, though, that corruption is now a very high-salience issue, is the same reason that democracy became a high-salience issue.

To some of your work on polarization, there’s a backlash effect that happens when Democrats start accusing Republicans of being corrupt because Donald Trump is doing this brazen corruption.

The thing that happens for Republicans is that they do the “What about…?”

So they say: No, Democrats are corrupt. Or: They’re all corrupt.

Part of what happens is this national conversation where one side is accusing the other of something, and so the other side does: What about…? — and then quickly it becomes a dominant issue.

Democrats were also accusing Republicans of being a threat to democracy after Jan. 6. But Republicans were accusing Democrats of having stolen the election. And pretty soon, democracy is the No. 1 issue.

And Democrats think: Oh, look, everyone cares about democracy. And I’m going: No, no, no, no, no — they don’t care about it the way you want them to care about it.

The Democrat who seemed to really figure out how to make the corruption case against Trump and get people to pay attention to it this cycle is Jon Ossoff.

And Ossoff, in Georgia, is fascinating because that should be, in theory, a swing state. It’s a close state. We don’t even talk about it as a swing state this cycle. It’s like: Is he going to beat his opponent by eight points, by 10 points, by 12 points?

There’s more interest in whether or not he’s going to run for president than in whether he’s going to win in Georgia.

So what worked there?

Well, first of all, Jon Ossoff has the thing. He is a very talented person. He writes those speeches himself. He appears to believe it deeply.

But he understands something about storytelling. I think oftentimes Donald Trump’s scale of corruption, scale of venality, leaves Democrats sputtering to make the longest list that they can make of all of the horrible things. And it leaves people just with their arms up.

Jon Ossoff is taking it slow. He’s taking it one bite at a time, and he is writing to say: Hey, you’ve heard about this.

Archival clip of Jon Ossoff: Now maybe you saw Trump’s so desperate, he’s begging Putin for diesel. But listen to this.

Maybe they have, maybe they haven’t. But he’s inviting them into a story that he’s going to tell where he’s going to give them information about what Donald Trump is doing.

Archival clip of Ossoff: Y’all remember Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, the so-called special envoy responsible for diplomacy with Russia and in the Middle East? Do you remember the other special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who co-founded the president’s crooked crypto business, World Liberty?

OK, so follow me through on this. What Jared and Steve are doing right now is negotiating with Putin to sell billions in Russian oil fields and refineries and gas stations to the president’s friends.

You’ve got Sheikh Tahnoon, the Emirati spy chief, who paid half a billion to the Trump-Witkoff crypto business. Then you’ve got the Al-Khayyat brothers, two Syrians who are financing Jared and Ivanka’s multibillion-dollar Albanian resort project.

And then the third partner, a billionaire megadonor to Trump’s campaign. Oh, and the U.S. government would take a 15 percent stake, by the way. Are you getting the picture?

He’s just very adept at saying: I’m going to walk you through what’s happening.

Archival clip of Ossoff: Amid a global energy crisis, the president’s son-in-law and the president’s business partner are brokering the sale of Russian oil fields to the first family’s friends.

The same friends who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump family businesses. […]

They are literally the elites they pretend to hate.

More Democrats need to figure out how to talk about this. Because I do think Americans — whether it is all the court cases, all the lawsuits against Donald Trump — when there is scale, they get lost, and it becomes white noise. It’s why Hunter Biden, the specifics of it, Republicans can make a meal out of it.

But the level of Donald Trump’s corruption is so big and so multifaceted and so difficult to follow, that it can become white noise if you don’t lay it out step by step. And that’s what he’s doing.

How much did Jeffrey Epstein matter here?

I think it mattered in terms of setting up Donald Trump to fail his base immediately. [...]

There is an analogy here to something you were saying right at the beginning of our conversation, which is that Trump has made a series of decisions — war in Iran, tariffs — and everybody knows it’s him.

One thing that has always seemed meaningful about Epstein — and has been harder for Trump in his second term is that: In his first term, Trump did this slight magic trick, but there was also some truth to it — he was the president, but he was up against the deep state.

There was a reality that he didn’t really quite have control of the government he led. And it wasn’t a deep state in the way he put it, but the sense that Trump could somehow be the president and still be anti-establishment was real.

In that world, Epstein has become this synonym for a corrupt, pedophilic, untouchable elite.

And the fact that it seemed to people that Trump was more on the side of whatever that was than on their side seems to get to this larger reality of him — that he’s the establishment now. MAGA is in charge. So he can’t say: These guys over here are stopping me from doing it.

It’s all just him.

I think that’s right. I talk a lot about the schism that I see between the MAGA establishment and the America firsters.

There is this new break in the party, and the America firsters are sort of like: Real America first has never been tried.

This is your Marjorie Taylor Greenes, it’s your Tucker Carlsons. These are the people who are anti-Israel. They think that Trump really broke faith over the Iran war. That’s the thing that caused them to go out on him and to really start taking him on.

The MAGA establishment, though, is Trump. It’s Rubio. It’s Mike Johnson. These are people for whom Trump is the sun and the moon, and whatever their public policy, it’s going to be dictated by Trump.

So you get somebody like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Why is Dan Bongino back out after being the deputy at the F.B.I.? He’s back out because he can’t release the Epstein files, and it was ruining his street cred on his podcast.

Kash Patel is not really doing the job. He just runs around and hangs out with his girlfriend. And that’s how Donald Trump wants it because he wants a heat shield. It’s why Pam Bondi had to go, right?

He needs these heat shields for why he’s not releasing the Epstein files, and I think his voters are hip to it. They know there’s no reason this shouldn’t be coming out.

Why is Pete Hegseth still there?

Well, I do think that Donald Trump needs somebody to take the fall for the war.

My guess is that Pete Hegseth goes after the midterms.

But nobody buys that it was Hegseth’s war.

I mean, Pete Hegseth would like it to be Pete Hegseth’s war. So he’s out there stumping for it pretty hard. But it’s difficult to change course in the middle of this. Actually, I don’t even know why I’m trying to explain this, because it’s preposterous that Pete Hegseth was in that role in the first place. It’s preposterous he’s still there.

What do you do when you’re losing a war to Iran, and then you give these weird Pattonesque speeches where you talk about “no trannies, no fatties, no beardos, no weirdos?” [...]

So that is one part of it.

Then the other part of it is when voters are experiencing direct negative personal consequences, and that is obviously at the gas pump, and they can connect, right? I listen to voters all the time. They can’t quite pronounce or even conjure the Strait of Hormuz, but they know about it. They know there’s this reason that gas isn’t getting here, and that’s why everything is more expensive.

They also understand that gas prices aren’t just about gas, especially in a place like Iowa.

None of these things are in a vacuum. You get these higher gas prices that are also raising food costs, that are also raising farmers’ costs, that are having an effect on the supply chain and the trucks that drive it. Americans actually understand more of that type of thing than they do a lot of the complexities around health care or other issues.

They understand that prices are rising across the board in a lot of different ways that are squeezing them. They experience it like a cavalcade of prices going up across the board that they feel. And then they look, and they see the war, and it gives them a place to say: That’s the thing doing it.

I think we are in an era of price politics that we were not in for a very long time, because inflation was so low for so many years in America. [...]

But I do think one of the things that is just going to be very difficult for politicians of all parties for an extended period is that prices went up so much over the past couple of years that now every incremental increase is just agonizing. Because what they are not doing ever is going down.

This feels to me like something that he has not internalized. It’s going to be very interesting to me to see whether Democrats have actually internalized it. Because right now, you need to treat prices as an emergency, and anything you do that seems like it is raising prices is going to infuriate people.

Trump is endlessly saying: The affordability thing is a hoax. Prices are a hoax.

And they’re being generous to what he’s saying. From what we’re discussing, you would think inflation was 7 percent right now. It’s not.

But he came into office promising to bring down prices. Instead they are going up, and he’s doing things that drive them up, and gas has been particularly bad.

I don’t think people have internalized that the price level we are now at, the base line of prices, has just completely changed pricing as a political issue.

I think that’s something that Democrats are going to have to start thinking about. Because I think that Democrats have internalized it from a messaging standpoint.

They know that they need to talk to people about affordability. And they know how to go on offense — against the Trump administration, against the tariffs, against the things he is doing to exacerbate people’s affordability woes.

What they have not done yet is said: Here’s what we’re going to do about it.

You hear about health care costs in the focus groups. I hear about health care costs in the focus groups all the time.

So Democrats, I think, are going to come in and say: The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to get rid of Trump’s cuts to your Medicaid, and we’re going to try to make health care more affordable. We are going to get rid of the tariffs. All the things that Trump did to exacerbate it, we’re going to stop. We’re going to get rid of the war.

But I think we will be in a vortex of backlashes if one party doesn’t figure out — and I think it’s going to have to be Democrats, and this is one of the reasons I like Jon Ossoff so much — a way of explaining to the American people that you can’t just press a button and lower costs, that there is a series of choices that we need to make and that the debt is $40 trillion now.

And interest rates are very high.

And interest rates are very high.

And that matters when you go to buy a home or get a car loan.

This is why, if a Democrat wins in 2028, it is not a small task that they are up against. This is one of the things I was really frustrated with Joe Biden about. Because he wasn’t in a position to communicate well or strongly with voters, he wasn’t able to frame the economy as a recovery and to talk all the time about how we were recovering well, but it still wasn’t good. It wasn’t good enough.

Instead, they were trying to tell people: No, things are fine. Things are good.

Trump is doing the exact same thing right now, and I think whoever comes next is going to have to level with the American public about where our economy is.

I also think that something Republicans are not preparing for — I don’t see them preparing for it — that’s going to be central in politics in 2028 is that the Medicaid cuts haven’t hit yet. The Medicaid cuts are enormous. They’re going to throw millions of people off health care, millions of Trump voters off health care.

The way the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was constructed, they delayed it till after the midterms. But every state agency in the country right now is preparing to implement these cuts because it is statute, it is law.

So the Trump administration has sent Obamacare into a spiral. They’ve destroyed the expanded subsidies and a bunch of things that were keeping those markets stable, so the individual markets are moving into chaos. You have Medicaid being thrown into chaos.

Medicare for all is polling higher than it has ever polled before. Meanwhile, the left of the Democratic Party has moved off the idea that Medicare for all means abolishing all private health insurance, so they’ve moved off the more dangerous political position.

I think we’re moving back into a period of health care politics. And I don’t think the next thing is just going to be repatching Obamacare. I think that we’re past that now.

I 100 percent agree with this. And again, this has nothing to do with any of my own personal political beliefs but only what I hear from voters. Which is that I think some kind of universal health care is just an idea whose time is going to have come because of a variety of factors.

All I hear about in focus groups from voters across the political spectrum — and this is where I do think some of the reasons that the D.S.A. types are a little more ascendant, and they believe that there is a sort of new coalition out there — is that they hear Trump voters talking about wanting something to be done about health care.

We’re not talking about country club Republicans who want to talk about different insurance markets. You are just hearing rural voters or working-class voters, noncollege voters — for whom health care is an enormous expense and an enormous burden from a complexity standpoint in how they interact with their insurance companies or the health care systems.
Voters want something that is more simple, less expensive, and higher quality.

I get that sometimes people say things to me like: Well, we could never have comprehensive immigration reform. Or: We’ll never have universal health care. We had these debates, and they lost.

And I’m like: Guys, the world has changed in ways that are making people more open than ever to the idea that we need some kind of universal system.

One of my pet theories is that in the 2028 debates, you’re going to see some Republicans starting to talk about universal health care, because it is going to be such a popular thing with voters.

Well, they may talk about it, but what they never actually want to do is to do it.

They will not do it.

Health care is traditionally the strongest Democratic issue. Immigration is traditionally Trump’s strongest issue.

It is an issue where his administration — under the leadership of Stephen Miller — has been more aggressive, more thought out and more planned on immigration than on any other single issue. It’s been the place where they’ve been the most proactive.

What do you hear from Trump voters about immigration?

Trump voters are a wide range on this.

It is still Trump’s highest-polling issue, but he’s still, I think, around 43 percent on immigration, while he’s in the 20s on affordability, inflation and the war in Iran.

So it is still one of his better-performing issues because — and I think he will get some credit for this from voters on the right in the focus groups — he has closed the border. People feel like that was the right thing to do. That is the popular position broadly for people. They want the border to be closed.

There are people who I would put as Trump’s hard-core base who still think he’s not deporting hard enough, and so you do hear that from Trump voters.

But I would say the majority — especially the more independent voters who might not seem like traditional Republicans but have always been Trump voters because they find him to be a more populist, heterodox person — these are the voters you hear say: I thought he was just going to deport criminals. The masked agents in the streets are crazy.

I talk about the last-in, first-out voters — young people, Hispanics. A lot of Hispanic voters will be very tough. They have tough immigration policies. They do not want people to come here illegally. On the other hand, they live in the communities where ICE is showing up at schools and dragging parents off.

These are voters who know people who are showing up for court — they’re doing it the right way — and that’s where ICE is apprehending them. So there is an enormous frustration over the inhumane way that the deportations are being carried out.

And there’s a lot of criticism in the focus groups over those excesses.

I want to play a clip from some of his voters talking about this in some of these groups.

Voter 1: Border control for me was a very big thing. It was one of my biggest concerns with this election, cleaning up the country and getting these dangerous illegals out. But I don’t like how innocent people, professionals, have been incarcerated or taken.

Voter 2: I don’t like the way immigration’s going. It seems like there’s no rhyme or reason or system going. Are they just grabbing people and putting them in camps?

Voter 3: I do agree that we should stay on top of actual illegal immigration and criminals, but there’s plenty of criminals already here that we could do a better job with instead of focusing on people that are — even if illegal — working and kind of minding their own business.

What I hear when I hear that — and I’ve heard a lot of this also on podcasts like Rogan’s and from some of the people who swung toward Trump on this issue in 2024 — is that Democrats always have this problem where they don’t like to deal with the fact that the public has ideas of the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Democrats want to say: There’s no distinction, and everybody deserves help. But that’s not where the public usually is. They want people to work and to show up, and that often gets Democrats in trouble.

Republicans on immigration, the MAGA right at this point, don’t have “good immigrants” and “bad immigrants.” It definitely doesn’t have “good illegal immigrants” and “bad illegal immigrants.” It just really has an antipathy toward immigrants.

And now you see this spilling out into crazy things, like saying there are too many Indian American students at a college-football game. It’s going into crazier and crazier places, more and more racist places, to be blunt about it. [...]

There is a spectrum of Trump voters on this. There are racist people, and there are people who are just like: Deport harder — get every single person out of here. That is not the majority of Trump voters.

The majority of Trump voters make a couple of distinctions. One is the one we’ve talked about, where they say dangerous criminals should go. But the person who’s paying taxes and has been here for 25 years, who lives down the street — leave that guy alone. That’s part of it.

The other distinction they make, though — and I hear this all the time from voters — is a sense of fairness. They say: I want immigrants to come here, but I want them to come — and this is the key phrase you hear — “the right way.”

And what they mean, and this is very important for people to understand, is that Americans have no idea what it is to go through the immigration system.

So when they say: Come the right way — they assume that there is some easy process by which one can become a naturalized citizen. They just have no idea what it looks like, though.

When they see people coming across the border illegally, they say: Hey, somebody is standing in line over here, trying to come the right way, and this person is breaking the law coming in.

They do not want a country in which immigrants don’t come. Americans actually are quite good about talking about this. As soon as you start talking about immigration, one of the first things they will tell you is their own immigrant story: when their grandparents came here or the immigrant who they know or the person they’re married to who is an immigrant or their family.

Americans are not that hostile to the idea of immigration, they are hostile to the idea of coming here illegally across the border.

Is this another example of where people perceive Trump’s priorities diverging from their own? Because there were two instrumental arguments I would hear Republicans, including Trump, make. One was the dangerous criminal illegal immigrants. The other was that immigrants were taking your jobs, buying your homes and pushing up prices in different places.

Both of those things fit into a sense of disorder under Joe Biden. New York City was a place where there was a big swing toward Trump in the election, and something I heard from a lot of people in New York City was that they just didn’t like seeing the disorder around them.

They don’t like the sense that their government is not holding order. People prize order very highly. That is a job they entrust government with.

Trump comes in with “law and order” Republicanism. There’s a reason “order” is in that phrase.

But he, Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino created disorder. When people looked at what was happening in Minnesota and Americans getting shot by government agents, when they looked at these deployments — the Trump administration seemed to be creating disorder.

They were creating violence. They were creating frightening visuals. What instead seemed to be happening was things were getting all the more out of control, just in the other direction. Is that ——

No, I think that’s completely right. This is happening where they live. This is not abstract to them. When you talk to voters in the focus groups, they’re the people living in the places that we’re talking about on the news.

So they will say: I took my kid to school, and there were ICE agents who showed up at the school, and they had masks on, and there are kids there. What are we doing here?

And yet they’re seeing images on their TV of masked agents shooting an I.C.U. nurse in the back.

I can’t tell you how much the agents covering their faces is a problem for voters. They don’t understand why their faces are covered. That’s not something they’re used to seeing from law enforcement.

I don’t agree. I think people understand exactly why their faces are covered.

Well, I think that’s true. I think what I mean is they don’t like it. They don’t like their faces being covered. That’s not something they normally see from law enforcement.

When people say: Well, they’re worried about being targeted — people are like: That’s not a thing. We have accountability in this country.

The police go without face covers. I’ve heard this, too, and it drives me insane. Everybody knows what it means when the government begins sending people in masks after you.

It means two things. It means the thing they are doing is bad enough that maybe they are worried about being targeted. It also means the government knows the thing they are doing is bad enough that it is a problem if their faces can be seen.

When the government starts doing that, they are creating a zone of action that is wider because they are creating anonymity. They are shifting the relationship between the agents and the public because there is no face-to-face relationship between them. [...]

We’ve been mostly talking here about things where Trump is the central driver. He drives the war in Iran. He has a lot of space for action on prices, tariffs and immigration.

We’ve been talking about corruption, but the other thing that seems to be driving races all across the country, though doesn’t seem to be directly emanating from Trump, is data centers.

When I look at a bunch of the key Senate races — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Josh Turek in Iowa — you see a lot happening around data centers.

I’m curious how those have begun playing into what you’re hearing in your focus groups.

The data center issue started to come up in 2025 in the off-season races, where you had Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. This is again why I love focus groups. It caught me off guard.

It was the dominant thing that voters in those races were talking about. In their minds — and again, like immigration, A.I. is one of these issues that activates people across multiple vectors — their energy prices are going up. They think that the data centers themselves are a blight or disruptive in their communities in some way. And the third thing they say is: Are we building these things in our communities that are ultimately setting up to take our jobs from us?

And the companies are like: Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe — that’s right. [...]

When I go home to central Pennsylvania, in the more rural areas, that’s where you see the “No Data Center” signs. It’s another thing that is taking the rural voters, who usually show up in enormous numbers for Republicans, and diminishing their enthusiasm for Republicans. Because they don’t want the data centers. It’s in the rural communities where there’s lots of land that these are actually happening.

The other reason I think data centers are frustrating people is that they’re turning out in their local communities to vote against them. But then they’re often happening anyway, which is creating a real sense of frustration among voters that this is a thing being done to them.

I want to hold on that. We were looking at some clips of voters talking in your groups about this, and you really get at this sense of powerlessness, so I want to play them.

Voter 1: People are voting here in Pittsburgh, in these old mill sites, and they’re putting these data centers. People are saying: We don’t want them. We don’t want them. We don’t want the pollution. We don’t want this anymore. But yet they just keep coming, and there’s no stopping.

It doesn’t matter who the governor is or who the mayor is. They’re all on board because it’s job creation. And it’s just not job creation. It’s short-term gain for long-term pain.

Voter 2: We’re actually having one right now in our town. Everybody voted no on it, and then it came out that it was already in the process and a done deal. The farmers had already sold their property and everything for this to start being built. So basically, everybody that showed up to city hall was for nothing. Our word doesn’t matter.

One of the things I’ve always thought Trump really understood is how powerless people felt in politics, and he sort of presented himself as an answer to that. Like: You might be powerless, but I am powerful. I know how the system works. I have worked it. I have bribed these politicians before.

Totally.

And then this happens, and where’s Trump? Trump is completely pro-data center. He calls Jensen Huang during the All-In Summit, and they’re all just talking about how Trump isn’t going to fall for this anti-data center hoax.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: Google wants to build a big one in Finland — which I’m not happy about because they were unable to get permitting. And I’m telling you, it’s all a hoax. The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy. And it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It’s bigger than the internet and the A.I., you know, much more so.

Look, Trump is not an ideological person, and he certainly doesn’t care about regular Americans. He does care what the All-In podcast guys say about him. He cares what the donor class that he is talking to says and how they talk to him. Those are the people who stand to benefit the most from the data centers, and he is on their side.

I’m sure a lot of those people are coming in and explaining to Trump all of the long-term benefits and how we have to compete with China. That competitive instinct is something that I do think Trump gets into.

But what’s interesting about Trump is that for all the credit he gets for being a good communicator, he’s not trying to have a conversation about this with the public at all. He’s not trying to explain what the benefits might be. I mean, he throws a couple of things out there, but mostly he just tells voters: Stop caring about this. Affordability is a hoax. We’re going to do data centers. They’re great. [...]

What voters really want is someone to take them through it: How should we feel about this?
The problem is — I will say this, having talked to many Democrats and Republicans in office about this — none of them actually know how they feel about it. That is the hard thing about A.I. — and the interesting thing about it as a political issue. [...]

This is why I’m so suspicious of California politicians who run for national office — I think you have to be surrounded by the people who live in the swing states to have an instinct for what matters to a median voter. If you’ve cultivated your political career in California, you simply don’t have the gut-level instinct to be around a Georgia, Pennsylvania or Michigan swing voter.

So I am looking at politicians who both have that gut instinct — because they come from these places and their political careers were forged there — and who are good at talking to people and have a record of good governance.

People want a candidate who feels like they care about them. And Donald Trump conned people into believing that he cared about them when he didn’t, but people were so desperate for it that they were willing to be conned.

We’ve talked a lot here about people who voted for Trump and are maybe souring on him. But obviously, he maintains support from a huge number of his voters and a lot of Republicans.

So when you hear from the people who are still very pro-Trump — they voted for him in 2024, think he’s doing a great job and don’t regret that vote at all — how do they understand him? What is different in the picture they’re seeing from what we’ve been talking about?

The number one thing that people say to indicate that they’re still appreciative of what Donald Trump is doing is that he has made it clear that there are two genders, and that he is keeping biological men out of women’s sports.

They are still deeply into a lot of the cultural fights — the places where they think that Democrats are weird or overly woke. They tend to be people who are so polarized and so deeply anti-Democrat that, out of tribal allegiance, they continue to support Trump and will brook no dissent on that because they’re very dug in.

It is part of their personality and identity. The Trump thing is who they are. Which is again why I’m a bit skeptical about the future of the Republican Party without Trump.

It is mostly on the cultural things. Which leads me to the thing I am most curious about coming up in this election — something that I’ve been pretty obsessed with: Is it vibes or turnout then?

If it’s enthusiasm, vibes or turnout, Donald Trump turns out rural voters at Assad-like margins. So what happens when he’s no longer there to turn out these voters who were never part of the political process before but are Trump-only voters?

For Democrats, who have college-educated voters, those people are much more in tune. They read everything, they closely follow the election, and they show up to vote.

Whereas a lot of these low-information voters who turn out just for Donald Trump might not turn out in the midterms. But even more, when you add on top of that people who are depressed about what Trump is doing and don’t like their Republican candidates, I think that is why you end up in wave territory.

by Ezra Klein and Sarah Longwell, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

France is on the Brink

The French have a phrase for it: “un engrenage,” a vicious spiral. That’s what France is in. Several crises have been long in the making; each now threatens to accelerate the others.

The first is a crisis of liberal democracy. Polls suggest that the far right may take power in the presidential election next spring. The second is a crisis of fiscal mismanagement. France’s public debt has reached a record $4 trillion, with the cost of new government borrowing surging above that of Italy and Greece. The third is a crisis of youth disaffection. French students, protesting against dilapidated schools and diminished life chances, have blocked nearly half of the country’s high schools in the past few weeks.

Clashing with police and bearing inspiring banners, the students have riveted the world’s attention. The protests are certainly dramatic and significant. So too is the rise of the far right. But the fiscal crisis is the most dangerous, underlying many of the country’s woes and threatening to bring it to ruin. France, truly, is on the brink.

The high school protests began in the poor suburbs of Paris in mid-September. They have spread to state-run schools in every region of the country, from big cities to provincial towns. The 15- to 18-year-olds are rebelling against long hours, large class sizes, frequent teacher absences and crumbling school buildings. They also worry about global warming, the rise of the far right and the A.I. threat to jobs for the young. At the center of their complaints is chronic underinvestment.

This is something of a conundrum. After all, the French state spends a great deal on education: around $100 billion a year, or 5.1 percent of gross domestic product, above the European Union average. So what’s going on? Crucially, more than a quarter of that money goes not to the young but to the old, paying the pensions of retired teachers. That points to one of the root causes of the country’s problems. About one-quarter of all state spending goes to pensions; another quarter goes on social services, from health care to unemployment benefits.

No French government has balanced its books for 52 years. Even so, the French debt pile, at 119 percent of gross domestic product, is lower than that of some other countries, including the United States. As recently as 2019, President Emmanuel Macron managed to bring the annual deficit within the E.U. target of 3 percent of G.D.P.

Then came the pandemic. Mr. Macron’s pledge to spend “whatever it takes” to keep the French economy alive during lockdown sent the deficit rocketing to 9.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2020. Accumulated debt rose by $335 billion in one year. France was then slower than other E.U. countries to ease its pandemic subsidies. The government spent another $95 billion to shelter France from rising energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

After that, Mr. Macron lost control. He was re-elected in 2022 but failed to win a majority in the National Assembly. He imposed a modest pension reform in 2023, increasing the official retirement age gradually from 62 to 64. He argued, rightly, that France needed to work longer to afford its generous pensions and welfare system. Yet over 70 percent of French people disagreed, some violently.

In response, Mr. Macron called an ill-advised snap election in 2024, which further reduced the size of his centrist coalition. Since then, two prime ministers have proposed solutions to French overspending. Both were booted out by a majority of left-wing and far-right lawmakers in the National Assembly. The result has been a curious blend of stalemate and chaos.

Mr. Macron deserves some of the blame for the mess. So does the opposition, from the far-left France Unbowed to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. They have preferred to play political games rather than address the gathering fiscal disaster — especially the stifling weight of pensions and other social payments. In February, the center-left Socialists allowed a budget to pass for this year but only at the price of suspending Mr. Macron’s pension reform. [...]

France remains in many ways a robust and wealthy country. Yet market distrust of France is not so much economic as political. The markets doubt whether a poisonously splintered political system, increasingly dominated by extremes of right and left, will ever agree to the painful changes that are needed to get the public finances back on track. The country, they fear, is becoming socially volatile and institutionally paralyzed. That explains the withdrawal of confidence that has pushed France’s borrowing costs sky-high.

by Mujtaba Rahman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters
[ed. See also: France and the limits of liberalism (Noahpinion); and, France’s Debt Crisis Deepens as Foreign Investors Look for the Exit (WSJ).]

Sacrificial Ham

On Kimberly Guilfoyle, recently departed US ambassador to Greece

... with her fame-hungry dreams and money-ravenous schemes, she didn’t violate the Trump ethos. She paid tribute to it. She didn’t contradict the Trump brand. She was its gaudy, greedy hood ornament.

In conventional political circles in ordinary times, an aide gets the ax because he or she has fallen out of step with the other members of the team and misunderstood the operation’s ideals. Guilfoyle understood and embodied them perfectly.

That’s what makes her banishment so interesting. It speaks to one of Trump’s favorite parlor tricks: pretending to be the opposite of who he is by feigning offense at behavior that’s a mirror of his own. He accuses Democrats of the very political thievery that he has attempted. He calls his predecessors economic ignoramuses as he redefines incompetence in that arena. And he signals disapproval of how Guilfoyle took advantage of her station as if such unscrupulous opportunism isn’t the very essence of him, his family and his friends.

The way I figure it, Trump made an example of Guilfoyle so that he doesn’t have to crack down on others in his rancidly corrupt administration. She’s the sacrificial ham. And he allowed himself an extra measure of cruel fun by acting as if he barely knew her.

“She wasn’t a member of my family,” he told reporters who asked about her resignation when it was announced last week. “She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”

A long time ago? Guilfoyle, 57, and Donald Trump Jr., 48, broke up in 2024. The president guesses? She and Junior were engaged and owned a house together in Florida. And she shrieked her allegiance to his wretched clan in speeches at both the 2020 and the 2024 Republican conventions. People in the front rows still haven’t gotten their hearing back.

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ben Wiseman
[ed. Ah, schadenfreude. So satisfying sometimes, especially when so hilarious. Not part of our regular programming, but hard to resist rolling around in the mud every once in awhile. 😄 See also: this Wall Street Journal report (Flor de Maga?):]

***

"She began dating Trump Jr. halfway through his father’s first term and quickly emerged as one of Trump’s most aggressive defenders. In her 2020 convention speech, she warned that Democrats were trying to enslave Americans with liberal ideology.

The couple got engaged before Trump left office, and that spring they bought a $9.7 million Florida mansion. Guilfoyle pursued a series of business ventures—a line of hair care and fragrances called Flor de Maga; champagne ventures with names such as 1776 Liberté and Liberty Dream; a pet pharmaceuticals service called PETriot Vet, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records. Those trademarks have since been abandoned."

Billionaires Want to Buy This Election. It Isn’t Working.

Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy.

One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.

Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.

In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.

The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.

This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.

Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.

Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.

By David Wallace-Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ibrahim Rayintakath

[ed. The party of grift overplayed its hand. But, never underestimate the gullibility of the American public.]